Monki Gras in the Spring, Monktoberfest in the Fall. These events define the rhythms of our year at RedMonk - like holidays they define our interactions as a community.  

The Monki Gras scheduling heuristic I used these days is to hold the conference the week before KubeCon Europe, so people can make the trip from the States, come to my show and then head on to KubeCon.

Monki Gras, then, was late last month. It was so good to have the community around us, so many old friends, but also a sense of community renewal, appropriate for a conference in the Spring. One of the beauties of Monki Gras and the Diversity program that we run, sponsored by Oracle this year, is that there are new faces joining the community. The feedback I got from our diversity scholars was universally positive. RedMonk believes in community and we believe in inclusion and nothing is going to change that. 

Monki Gras 2026 was a hit - Chris Swann, who has been to every Monki Gras said he felt it was the best one yet. We’ll take it.. Great talks, plenty of laughs, and a few tears. The theme this year - Prepping Craft - about being prepared in uncertain times, was always like to suggest some emotional responses. Adam Zimman’s talk about being a (good) parent of trans kids definitely got us all in the feels. So a few tears then. But mostly it just felt like a very supportive space, which is exactly what we intend at our events.We're proud and lucky to be able to run Monki Gras and Monktoberfest. Take a look at the post I wrote about it. Amazing speakers, fantastic sponsors, a brilliant community, and I feel blessed.

The week after MG26 I hopped on a very short flight to Amsterdam for KubeCon EU. The event was really great again this year, the biggest KubeCon event ever - over 13,500 attendees. The Kubernetes community is an incredible ecosystem and the friendships are very real. Amsterdam was great. Quite tiring in the end; after two weeks on the go I was ready to not talk to anyone for a bit.  

But no rest for the wicked - I am at Google Cloud Next in Las Vegas this week so we're definitely well into conference season. I'll be in Boston in a couple of weeks for IBM Think. (So much for less travel - Ed.)

As I say the rhythms of the seasons and events and now we're looking forward to Monktoberfest again. Stephen will be taking talk submissions and we are looking for sponsors. The Fall will be here before we know it.  

But in the meantime let’s enjoy the spring and summer. The weather’s been really lovely in London.  

So seasons, events, and communities. It’s what we do. On to Summer.  

- James Governor

Links Roundup

• "If software is a thing you build, then vibe coding changes everything. Anyone can build. [We have democratized building. Congratulations to building. But software is mostly a thing people use, and getting people to use things is not a building problem. It never was."

• James Governor and his Progressive Delivery co-authors started a podcast! Check out The Third Loop for episodes about how changing technology impacts users.

• An excellent summary of how Intercom uses Claude Code. Originally a long thread on a social network, it's now written up as a blog post about the Claude Code plugin system Intercom built with 13 plugins, 100+ skills, and hooks that turn Claude into a full-stack engineering platform. The end of the post is arguably the most revealing: "The wild thing is we’re just getting started. All technical work and our entire SDLC is getting skill-ified. Remote agents will accelerate things even more."

• Hullaballooing. This is arguably the best part of the Claude Code leak.

Recent RedMonk Research

• Monki Gras 2026 Wrapped!: This year’s theme was “Prepping Craft” – in a world where safety and normality are slipping away, how do we make our code, our communities, and our lives truly resilient?

• This edition of the RedMonk Programming Language Rankings is either three months late or two months early, depending on whether you go by the calendar year or when we have been dropping our Q1 results lately. In any event, we have been hard at work not only compiling the latest rankings for your inspection, but also grappling with anomalies both transient and existential: The RedMonk Programming Language Rankings: January 2026. RM clients mentioned: AWS and Github

• RedMonk continues our tradition of exploring how different programming languages are reflected in publicly available data sets. We have more analysis coming about the state of the data sets themselves, but for now here is how the languages themselves have fared over time. RM clients mentioned: AWS and Github

• As of last month it'd been two years since Redis was forked and the Valkey project was born. As such, it seemed like a good time to check in on some of the metrics and look at how the projects are evolving side by side: which organizations are taking part, what their commit patterns tell us, and more: Two Years of Valkey. RM clients mentioned: Amazon, Google and Percona

• Steve O'Grady writes about The State of Open Source Licensing in 2026

• In recent months something has shifted with RedMonk’s weekly podcast, The MonkCast. Our subscriber count on YouTube, Apple podcasts, and Spotify has quietly grown, and we think it’s worth pausing to reflect on how we got here—and where we’re going.

• Adventures in Vibe Coding! What did Kate Holterhoff learn about vibe coding RedMonk's monkcast.com? Self-reliance? Perspective? Gratitude to our AI overlords? Nah, but here are a few takeaways and reflections from her recent experience creating the monkcast.com website connected to the broader conversation she had with Rachel Stephens and Darko Mesaroš on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Kiro livestream. RM clients mentioned: AWS, IBM, Google, and GitHub/ Microsoft

Recent Videos

• The agentic AI landscape is constantly changing. Join Redmonk analysts, Rachel Stephens and Kate Holterhoff as they share their thoughts about how agentic coding and spec-driven development helps you stay organized in this ever-evolving tech landscape.

• Join RedMonk Co-founder James Governor and Alois Reitbauer, Chief Technology Strategist at Dynatrace, atop the London Eye where they discuss the experience of observing a city from different vantage points while unpacking one of observability’s most pressing challenges: how do you make sense of a complex, ever-changing system without drowning in data? Opinionated Infrastructure: Understanding the City without Memorizing the Map with Alois Reitbauer

• Join James and Alois again, this time on a fitness journey exploring how organizations can thoughtfully adopt AI without losing the human skills and judgment that make it effective. Opinionated Infrastructure: Getting AI Fit, A Guide to Proactive Observability with Alois Reitbauer

• In this episode of the MonkCast, RedMonk senior analyst Kate Holterhoff sits down with Kin Lane, API Evangelist and Co-Founder & Chief Community Officer (CCO) for Naftiko, to untangle one of the most pressing questions in developer tooling today: what happens to APIs and SDKs when AI enters the picture? SDKs in the AI Era with Kin Lane

• Kate Holterhoff talks to Mike Basios, CTO and Co-founder of TurinTech AI, about the new set of problems AI is introducing for engineering organisations, and what happens when you treat your entire stack—application code, data pipelines, inference systems, agent workflows, GPU and CPU kernels—as measurable artifacts that can be systematically validated and continuously improved. Mike Basios on Why AI-Era Engineering Needs a Measurement-First Approach

• Rachel Stephens sits down with Boris Bialek, VP of Industries and Global Field CTO at MongoDB, to explore why data remains the unshakable foundation beneath the fast-moving world of AI. “Data Is What I Can Control”: Why Your AI Strategy Starts at the Data Layer with Boris Bialek

• James Governor of RedMonk sits down with VMware by Broadcom’s Dilpreet Bindra and Zach Shepherd at KubeCon Europe 2026 in Amsterdam to unpack what they call “the best kept secret in the industry”: VMware by Broadcom’s deep, sustained contributions to the CNCF and Kubernetes ecosystem. Chopping Wood, Carrying Water: VMware by Broadcom’s Open Source Story at KubeCon EU 2026 with Zach Shepherd and Dilpreet Bindra

• ​​At KubeCon EU 2026 in Amsterdam, James Governor sits down with VMware by Broadcom’s Timmy Carr and Himanshu Singh to unpack how VMware is tackling two of the biggest challenges facing European enterprises today: complexity and sovereignty. Sovereignty Meets Simplicity for VMware by Broadcom at KubeCon EU 2026 with Timmy Carr and Himanshu Singh

• Stephen O’Grady sits down with Adam Jacob, CEO and Co-Founder of System Initiative, for a candid conversation about what it actually feels like to build software in the age of AI agents. “Absolute AI Maximalist” Adam Jacob on Building Software That Builds Software

• Infrastructure gets written off as table stakes, but if you’ve actually shipped software, you know how much pain comes from the friction between layers of the stack. In this RedMonk Conversation, Rachel Stephens sits down with Jay Thontakudi, Principal Product Marketing Manager at Broadcom, to dig into why the partnership between VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) and Canonical is more than “Linux runs on VMware.” Beyond the Hypervisor: Developing with Ubuntu on VCF

• In this episode of the MonkCast, RedMonk Senior Analyst Kate Holterhoff sits down with Chris Williams, Global Developer Relations Manager at HashiCorp, for a wide-ranging conversation that covers everything from tech certifications to corporate espionage (sort of): From Data Center Crawler to DevRel with Chris Williams

Meet the Monks

Events we'll be attending:

• IBM Think 2026: 4-7 May 2026, Boston, MA

• Red Hat Summit: 11-14 May 2026, Atlanta, GA

• Google I/O: 19-20 May 2026, Mountain View, CA

• Databricks Data + AI Summit: 15-18 June 2028, San Francisco + Virtual

Events we'll be hosting:

• The 2026 Monktoberfest: 1-2 October 2026, Portland, ME